


Tenere Possumus

by SilverShortyyy



Category: Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-26 01:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13225020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverShortyyy/pseuds/SilverShortyyy
Summary: The first time they touch, they both feel whole.The first time he grabs her shoulders, they both feel disgust.The first time she slaps him, they both feel anger.The first time he touches his forehead to her stomach, they both feel sorrow.The first time she locks their fingers together, they both feel happiness.Alternatively, five times Rey and Kylo Ren touch through the Force and the one time they didn’t.





	Tenere Possumus

**Author's Note:**

> _Tenerre Possumus_  
>  Latin, “ _We Can Hold_ ”

_You’re not alone._

_I’m not alone._

_We’re not alone._

His eyes are deep like the reaches of space and in it she sees the vastness of the universe. In it, she sees promises of stars and planets and worlds and _lives_ and _lifetimes_ but she sees beyond the grandeur and the fantasy and instead of faraway systems and exotic planets, instead of out-of-reach stars and dreams like that of a child’s, she sees his brown eyes reflecting fire light in her small hut, sees his brown eyes and the warmth that’s in there, the warmth and the glass and the plea. In there, she sees herself, and in his brown eyes she sees cold, isolation, and with the touch of her skin, it will turn to a warm hearth.

Her eyes are innocence wrapped in soil and humility, firelight tossed around like her mussed up hair blew side to side by the ocean’s temp breeze. He doesn’t see her eyes that were once bewildered by odd looking milk nor eyes begging to be told what to do; no, he looks into her eyes and he sees brown, brown like the ground and the brick walls in the firelight, brown and somewhat gold in the way the firelight dances on her irises, not leaving one spec of color untouched nor unfiltered. Her eyes, to him, are not lost nor found, but there, simply _there_ , an existence more real than Jedi masters or galaxy-famous parents, more real than any Force of nature or planet or star.

He is there. She is there. And neither of them remember boundaries and lines and stories; there are no dichotomies. There is just him and her, and existence.

His mistakes don’t exist. Her worries are but hasty whispers of a passing gale. His identity confusion but a passing comet in the night sky full of twinkling stars and promises.

And if only they could touch—

Then everything would be real and true, and neither of them will be alone anymore.

Because here, their hearts beat as one. They are one. They are none. They are the Force, and the Force is them. And the Force is but one power, and their existences are one with that power.

They are one and the same; two side of the same coin; twin flames.

The bonfire flickers in the middle of the small hut.

Just a little more, just a brick’s width, just a hair's breadth—

And his skin is like the tip of a hot flame, warm and welcome sparks dancing at her fingertips.

She reach out for more contact, and he feels her warmth raising to his veins and he can’t, for the life of him, decide to let go. He sees everything so perfectly.

The galaxy, the universe.

She sees him.

He sees her.

And they’re together.

And everything is at peace.

And nothing, _nothing_ , can ever break their hearts again.

Not abandonment. Not betrayal.

Because they have each other to fill in the gaps.

Then there’s a ripple. A wave. A tsunami. He feels it slam into him, and he’s sent back all the way onto cold metallic rooms, artificial light burning his eyelids cold.

And she, she’s alone. Alone again. Alone with a cold kind of shiver running through her body, freezing her fingertips.

They try to remember what they had seen, and she remembers him holding her hand at the beach of a Rebel Base, the First Order surrendered and the Stormtroopers released from their chains.

He, on the other hand, cradles his head and wishes for the old comforts of his helmet. He sees her, and he sees her holding his hand, and she dons a dark gown fitting her curves perfectly and molding into her body. She looks like a queen who could strike down an opponent at the shortest notice, a femme fatale with her brown eyes looking at him while he raised his fist to the New Order, absent of dichotomies and Jedis and Siths.

He thinks he sees her eyes void of warmth, but he ignores it thinking it’s just his own anxieties.

She thinks she sees his eyes a little too optimistic, as if there were no ghosts and anxieties and pasts he was trying to figure out. But she ignores it, thinking it’s just her doubts trying to cloud her better judgement.

He knows what he saw. She knows what she saw.

But really, all they saw was each other, and their hands interlocked.

* * *

_You’re nobody._

_You had everything._

_What makes you think you know what you do and don’t deserve?_

He wakes up from a memory, a memory before lightsabers burned through his skin, a memory of metal bridges and dramatic pleas and his persuasion to himself that he _will_ be better, he _will_ be stronger, he _will_ be all he’s ever wanted after he does _this_. He wakes up from the memory, and he gasps in cold sweat. His promises were never fulfilled, but _why_.

Because, he tells himself, he hasn’t eliminated his main enemy now.

She waltzed in like the story could be about her. The thought of her leaves him wanting to gag.

She wakes up from a memory and she remembers him, remembers seeing herself in him and all death threats dropped into the core of an icy planet, a planet cold to the bone that even its inhabitants are incapable of feeling warmth in their arteries and veins and cardiac organs. She wakes up from that same memory and she _hates_ him, the sheer afterimage of him in her mind leaving a taste like rust in her mouth, and she wants to slice the taste off her tongue, except there was no other way to take it away than to shake his image out of mind.

But then, again, he shows up.

He’s irritated that she has to suddenly appear at the corner of his quarters.

“You.” She says, like she has the audacity to blame him for anything.

He could have been done. Could have been finished with his training. Could have not done more stupid mistakes than he had already made. But then she came marching into his life like a little insignificant _bitch_.

“You. You, ‘Supreme Commander’, or whatever the _fucking hell_ you are these days!” He could crush her throat if he willed it; instead, he let her speak. He would rather her disgusting existence be quelled through actual combat than a manufactured connection linking them from two ends of the galaxy. “You have the _audacity_ to feel disgusted at _me_?!”

She feels what he feels. He feels what she feels. And he feels that she wants to throw up at the sight of him, throw up at the marks on his face and the black leather of his clothes, throw up at the absence of his mother’s eyes on his face or his father’s kindness in his hands.

And he almost gives a shit about what she thinks.

 _Almost_.

“Do you think you have the _fucking right_ to think the way you do? Feel _disgusted_ at _me_ for mistakes _you_ made? No, Ben, it wasn’t my fault that you failed, it wasn’t my _existence_ that caused you to cave in—“ She chokes on a sob. He almost reaches out to swipe away the nearly-falling tears.

He almost feels the crack in his heart at the way she looks at him.

“I wasn’t my fault that you weren’t _strong enough_!” Her presence makes him want to punch his lights, punch his door, punch his wall; all his nerves are on end, all his hairs standing up as if recognizing a nasty slime ball on the walls of his Star Destroyer. “ _You weren’t strong enough the moment you thought you had to kill your own father!_ ”

“ _SHUT UP_!” He says, and he shoots out of his bed at lightning speed. His nails dig like claws into her skin, and he nearly wants to make her bleed, to make her hurt for the way she makes him feel, for everything she’s done, for all the _bullshit_ she’s put on him.

Everything could have been fine. And things could still be fine if she had just joined him—

She tears his hands away regardless of the way it rips at her night shirt. Her glare burns into his soul, and he thinks not even his grandfather could survive being sunken into the fiery pit that she’s turned her eyes into.

“ _You disgust me, Kylo Ren_.” She spits it out like venom. A part of him almost gets wounded with the ease of a sharpened knife, except that he doesn’t feel like she has a right to say that, not when she didn’t grow up seeing all she could have but having it just out of reach of her fingertips. “ _Don’t ever touch me again_.”

Her eyes burn through him, and she disappears from his chambers.

His touch bruises, and she vomits later. His brown eyes burn at the back of her mind, and she hates it, hates that she’s willing to keep an unspoken promise to Leia, hates that she can’t forget the man she saw the first time they touched and couldn’t stop believing Ben Solo was still somewhere beneath the darkness.

* * *

His thoughts are like a memory she forces to the deepest recesses of her mind, thumping and pulsing and _fighting_ to be at the forefront but never quite getting there. His emotions are like knocks at a back door, louder and louder the less energy she has to tune it out. She hates it, his constant presence, but she had gotten around to tolerate it and even all out ignore it on her best days.

On her worst days, things become a little more worse for wear.

‘ _Would it kill you to be a little less angry ALL THE TIME?_ ’

She throws her coat on her mattress and yanks the ties off her hair. His anger drums at the back of her neck; it pulses in her arteries side by side with her own growing irritation.

_“Would it kill YOU to lay off?”_

“I very much well think it might.” She stands in front of him now, both of them with veins sticking out of their necks. Had she not been trained in the least of the Jedi arts, she bets she might have ripped her own head off just to silence his raucous thoughts.

“What do _you_ have to be angry about, anyway? _You_ don’t have to manage an entire galaxy, especially knowing you have extra work knowing _somebody_ chose to leave you alone—!”

“And what, join you and your iron fist of a government? It isn’t even a government—it’s bloody _dictatorship_! Worse than anarchy, you asshat!” She could feel the blood rushing into her biceps, into her fists. She curls her fists tighter; she isn’t going to do anything stupid tonight. “Besides, nobody asked for you to manage the entire fucking galaxy!”

“And so what, I just leave everything to chance? Let the galaxy collapse unto itself? _You_ made me kill Snoke—“

“ _ME_?! _I_ made you kill Snoke?! I don’t _recall_ asking you to get _blood_ on your hands for little ol’ me, did I?” She distinctly remembers begging him to spare her, to fight alongside her but _never_ did she ask him to commit outright _murder_.

“—And _you_ were the whole reason things got messy! If you hadn’t waltzed in to everyone’s lives—“

“What are you even on about? You make no sense!”

“—And now I have to do all this _shit_ with _Hux_ breathing down my _neck_ —“

“At least you’ve given Hux a hobby.”

“—All because you were too busy being a _nothing_ when you could’ve—“

 _Smack_.

Her palm stings and her hand is flat open. His eyes are wide and filling with rage, and she can see how he sees himself towering over her and backing her against a wall, grabbing her arms and slamming her, slamming her…

But her other hand smacks him across the face and, she thinks, it must hurt more now since her palm hit square on the scar she gave him.

“I don’t need you for me to be more than nothing.”

Her eyes burned, and she sees nothing else. Nothing, but his insufferable face, his aggravating face, the same face she dreamt of every night for all the things he’s done, for all the things he’s said, for all the hell he’s brought upon so many people and she thinks, she thinks he could do better, but on days like this she just wants to smack his face and oh the satisfaction when she hears the sharp _smack_.

And for once, she really hears her palm _smack_.

She feels him, though, and wants to rip her head off with how she feels him, feels his square shoulders burning with desire to flex, his biceps burning with the rush of blood, his fists itching to connect with her face or to grip her wrists and to show her who’s really at an advantage here.

But he doesn’t. And they both know why.

It’s the same reason she doesn’t pull him down to the ground beneath her and strangle his pitiful throat right then and there.

“Get lost, Ren.”

And she exits her room, hair mussed up and eyes burning with rage. At her absence, he walks over to his lamp, staring at it before ripping the wires off the wall and shouting his throat hoarse.

* * *

She had always been alone with him, even when she was in a room full of people when he appeared.

But now, now she’s alone with him and alone with someone else and they both don’t want to accept it, but the fact that he’s here because they both _need_ to be here changes everything. She wouldn’t let him touch her hand if she knew there’s a way around this, but he’s not connected to her landscape and she’s his link, and he needs her to forget anything that’s happened before, just for these moments.

A General, a Princess lays breathless and cold on her mattress, and they say she left of old age but neither of them believe it. There’s a note at the bedside left only for him to read, so Rey lets his hand grasp around her finger and lets him enter their ship.

They’d say he might take advantage of it. She knows he can’t.

He just _can’t_.

When his palm presses onto the General’s heart, Rey lets go because it’s all too intimate, all too _painful_ for all the right and wrong reasons. She doesn’t want to feel jealousy, but she does because at least he got to know his mother, at least his mother fought for him like she fought for nothing else in her life. Rey, Rey knew the face of sandstorms and cruel traders. Her mother was pitiful food rations while her father was intense heat and freezing cold.

He’s jealous too, because she doesn’t have a mother who she let down, who she didn’t know how to live up to, who she could never make smile now that _she’s gone_.

But they both cry, cry with silently streaming tears that trickle down in streams from the crinkle at the corner of the eyes, knowing they’ve both lost someone who was everything, whose smile was the entire galaxy smiling, whose Force was the center of the universe pulling everything into orbit. They both cry, because he could have made her happy, but he was stupid and he didn’t know, he _doesn’t know what to do_ and now she can’t help him, because she’s _gone_ and he’s _lost_ and everything’s _cold and dark_. They both cry, and she cries because just as she’s getting close, the thread snaps and she stares at the frayed end she’s left with.

Leia Organa-Solo was gone.

And no Force could take her back.

He knows the contents of Leia’s last note without reading it.

_‘I will always love you, son.’_

The paper is carbon and her dried tears, and if he kept it, Hux would find it. Hux would exploit that, at least exploit it as the Resistance’s weakness.

He crumples to the floor, and he’s glad his quarters are locked and defended, giving him an alarm the second anyone entered his corridor. He sobs, and he silences the loud cries trying to fight its way out.

He feels soft fingers, and he doesn’t want to be embraced by _her_ , so he pushes her up and places his fingers firm on her hips.

He stares for a while, and she doesn’t scream at him because she knows, knows and understands and is actually delighted because she feels the same way.

Her hands pull him against her stomach, and he cries into her. Cries, because it _hurts_.

But just like her, once he leaves the room, the tears are done and the mask is back on.

And just like him, her tears had no place anywhere outside this moment.

So he cried. And she cried. And she held him like he held her, and they broke apart not knowing how to fall back together, letting the pieces crash and shatter into how ever many pieces it wishes.

And they cried. They cried until his sobs are gone and her shoulders are still, and he stands up with neither of their eyes meeting, then he walks past her.

When she turns around, he’s gone.

She still feels the sobs he left on her stomach.

She takes a deep breath, and she takes the note left for him and tucks it away, tucks it away for him.

* * *

He knows she’s on Ahch-To, but he makes no move to tell Hux to lead any TIE Fighters there.

She knows he’s somewhere on the outer rim, following Hux’s advice (and _that_ was new—even Hux was surprised) to try to hunt the Resistance there. Though, she’s surprised he isn’t yet forcing his way through her memories to make things easier. She thinks maybe he’s trying to prove to himself he can do things on his own, without anyone’s help.

Another part of her thinks he’s only thinking it so he doesn’t have to be forceful with her.

She smiles, despite herself, knowing that the hope she sees isn’t lost after all.

_“His light is where yours starts,” Leia had said one day, during one of their training sessions. “And his darkness, where yours begins.”_

She closes her eyes, and she listens to her heartbeat, steady and strong with his following suit. Just as strong, just as steady, just as tangible and alive.

She feels the warm suns on Ahch-To and the cool sea breeze; she feels the sharpness of Star Destroyer lights and the coldness of the air system. She smells the dew and pollen, and the steel and leather.

She opens her eyes, and she feels his leather glove tickling the back of her hand. He lifts his hand, pulling on the fingers of the glove and taking it off.

He feels the suns too.

“Did you get my package?”

“Through your secret carrier? I did. The porg was certainly a perfect birthday gift for Hux.”

“I’ll bet.” She finally turns to him, and he looks so serene under the sunlight, so untouched with his curls resting on his head. He’s like a shadow, his black cape billowing behind him whenever he walks. And yet, here, she can’t see the black leather and black armor, but a hazy brush of dark blue and light brown.

“What?” Today, he doesn’t have his rageful eyes, or his temperamental frown, or his usually knit eyebrows. He looks at her, just looks at her, and she’s reminded why she loves him.

Unlike other days, he doesn’t look away. But she knows he feels the way her heart heaves, the way her cheeks flush at the thought.

_I love you._

“Do you see where I am?” She asks, and her fingertips brush the back of his hand the way the wind brushes blades of grass. “Can you feel the sun?”

“Yes.” And his eyes are staring into hers, and if she isn’t mistaken, they’re shining.

“Can you feel the wind and the grass?” She slides her palm onto his, and he submits. He faces his palm to hers, and they press, and he opens the gaps between his fingers and lets hers slide between. “Can you smell the flowers?”

_‘I can smell your hair.’_

“Yes.”

_‘I can feel your warmth and your hand in mine.’_

She looks up at him, and finally gets him to stop resisting. He looks down, and his hair covers his face and shrouds it in shadows. But the shadows are never dark enough, because she can see the twinkle in his eyes and the puff in his cheeks.

When he looks up, he’s smiling at her.

“Thank you.”

“Happy birthday.”

When he disappeared, she felt a tinge of pain, yes. But she felt his gratefulness, and the warmth of his hand and his gaze.

When he slips his glove back on, it’s after he places a silver band around his middle finger.

It had no words, just a single thin beam wrapped around his finger.

_“On the same planet where I got my crystal, there was a beam of silver.” She had told him, whispering her stories in the silence of the night. “It was told to tie two souls together for eternity, but you could only get a ray of silver light. It would form itself to whatever you wished, though usually turned to a pair of rings.”_

He’d be truer to himself now. That was what he promised her.

* * *

 

They’re standing in front of each other, on either side of the room, and they’ve been planets and stars and systems apart but they couldn’t have been farther than right here and right now.

“You don’t have to do this.” _We don’t have to do this._

They’re in a darkened room with no lights but from their sabers, and the red glow on his face makes her think back to the first time they’d crossed sabers, way back when in Starkiller Base.

“There’s no other way.” _Reality isn’t letting me walk away from what I’ve done._

He looks at her and thinks, thinks that maybe in another life he could have no blood on his hands and they could make it work. In another life, maybe there would be no Dark Side and Light Side and they could be who they are without being the two most prominent faces in the galaxy.

He thinks, and he knows this story has to end first if he wants them to have a real and fresh start.

“I’m sorry, Rey.”

“I’m sorry, too.”

And their sabers cross.

Their sabers cross, and it’s like they’re dancing in the dark, dancing in the eternal nothingness of the universe with just the two of them. His red makes her purple, and her blue makes his violet, and he remembers how she could have made hers green but she didn’t. She brings her saber down and sends sparks flying off where it meets his, and she remembers asking him why he made his saber different.

 _“I don’t want to be like everyone else.”_ He had said, and she remembers not knowing what to say because she couldn’t possibly know how it feels to be in the shadow of your relatives.

They bring their sabers down and their faces are inches away. They both know this needs to be done, and that there’s no way out of it now. She roars, and he grips, and their sabers glow red and blue and violet, and the room becomes so illuminated that the dark becomes light and everything’s blinding, do blinding. She pours all of the Force into her crystal, all her wishes and pains, all the history of the world and the galaxy she knows of, sucking all of the light from the room and into her crystal and her saber.

He, he pours all of the Force into his crystal, all his anger and pain and rage, all the legacies and burdens and expectations. He pours it all in, and his pleas for her to give up on him, to give up on _Ben Solo_ because Ben Solo is _gone_ , had been _killed_ so long ago, scarred and tortured and _murdered_ by a hand that couldn’t have been his own. He pours it all in, and he’s tired, so tired. He just wants it all to end.

No sound could be heard. Only light. And then there’s an incessant buzzing, and—

Their sabers turn off, and they’re plunged in complete darkness.

Their sabers slip from their grasp, and they don’t hear if it falls to the ground. All they feel is the infinitesimal touch from a familiar hand, and suddenly darkness isn’t so bad, because at least in the dark, nothing else exist but them.

And then the Force ignites.


End file.
